The Health Consortium of Anoia did not respond to requests for comment, but Roca indicates that prior to installing the cabinet this summer, the hospital managed surgical equipment and its use on patients manually. Tracking this information via paperwork is not foolproof, she says, since it requires several steps of manual effort by staff members. If surgical products are removed from shelves and used during an operation, a worker must create paperwork documenting that event, and attach the labels of each item used to that paperwork. The paperwork must then be photocopied, and those copies are sent to the ordering department to ensure replacements are requested. Failure to complete these steps could result in an item being out of stock at a time when the hospital needs it for surgery.
So this month, the hospital installed a Dyane SmartCabinet in its surgical unit’s hallway. The cabinet stores trocars, disposable laparoscopic instruments, pieces of mesh, laparoscopic staplers and other surgical items, all placed on trays behind locked doors. It can dispense these goods to authorized personnel who provide the proper password.
When a product is received at the hospital’s central warehouse, a worker scans the item’s bar-code label to capture the product’s information, which is linked to its expiration date, description and lot number, and that data is received and stored in the Dyane software residing on the hospital’s server. The software prompts an RFID-enabled version of Toshiba Tec’s B-EX4 printer to encode an EPC Gen 2 passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tag (Palex uses tags from several vendors). The worker then affixes the tag to the product.
Once an employee brings the item to the surgical unit, it is placed on one of the cabinet’s trays. The reader built into the cabinet uses an array of antennas to capture the ID number on the product’s tag, and to forward that tag ID to the Dyane software via a cabled connection.